And Action. Nathan Drake, a blur of khaki and stubble, leaps from what must be the fiftieth rooftop high above the bustling streets of Yemen in pursuit of the be-suited villain. It’s his sixth take (‘life’, in olde game parlance) in the most impressive chase yet seen in a video game, one directed with the kind of technical flair that wins Oscars. As he spills through a market stall, agitating chickens into a cloud of feathered squawks, the camera quick-pans to exaggerate the sense of kinetic drama.

Into the road and a stunt-car driver accelerates ten feet forward out of the wings, braking on the director’s signal in just the right spot to allow Drake to tumble over the bonnet. Crash through a door and extras dressed as military police bark orders in machinegun-volley Arabic before retreating to the Green room for a sit down and a cup of tea.

No such respite for Drake, who leaps to grasp a window ledge with his fingertips then up and a dash to where a coat hanger turns a washing line into a 30-foot zip wire. Whoosh. And Cut.

Uncharted 3 is a game that has an unshakable sense of its own identity. The series has always had clear aims: an unapologetically mainstream Boy’s Own romp whose primary interest is in creating unrivalled thrills through daring spectacle rather than daring design. But in this, the third outing, it has settled into the kind of assured swagger that comes from finding repeated successes in a specific creative mine.

Its greatest debts are to Saturday matinee cinema, Indiana Jones puzzles and pacing, Jewel of the Nile romances born in the kiln of perilous adventure; Han Solo quips. But at this point in the trilogy the designers have established a template of their own to follow.

It’s a game in which the skin of your fingertips saves every rooftop leap, while each stonework puzzle solved in the belly of some inexplicably well-maintained tomb leads to another, yet more exotic continent. It’s a game of button-mash punch-ups that leave neither blood nor bruise, and conundrums whose solutions pop up if you take too long to unmask them. It’s a game about overcoming the odds, saving your friends, finding the treasure and getting the girl. Both of them.

Back to the rooftop chase, just one of any number of white-knuckle ride segments that lodge in the memory. The sequence demonstrates Naughty Dog’s peerless talent for cinematic flair, often surpassing its movie inspirations for mastery of the action set-piece.

But it also reveals another truth. Uncharted 3 is the most exciting game in the world, but only until you deviate from the script. Even in this chase the conflict between the developer’s theatrical choreography and player-controlled interactions is clear. In order to ensure each set-piece is set off correctly, the game commits the cardinal sin of insinuating you have full control of your character, but in fact tugging you towards trigger points – making sure you’re in the right spot to tumble over the bonnet of that braking car, for example.

Likewise, mistimed leaps are given a gentle physics-defying boost to reduce the staccato rhythm of having to restart a section. It’s entirely understandable given what the developer is attempting to achieve – an unbroken flow of action that leads to climax – but, at the same time, beneath the spectacle there’s a nagging feeling that your presence in the scene is an irritation rather than a preference.

Your freedom of choice risks ruining the shot. Indeed, throughout the game, if you jump into an area you are not supposed to visit, Drake will crumple on the floor dead, Naughty Dog switching role from movie director to vindictive god. That is not your predestined path: Game Over.

Read the rest over at Eurogamer here.

It’s just a sideshow attraction in Guardian Heroes, but Arcade Mode embodies all of the inimitable, brash creativity that has made its maker, Treasure, one of the best-loved game studios. Imagine, having selected your character in Street Fighter IV, that you were made to fight not one but every character in the game, all of whom piled on you simultaneously in an endless survival gauntlet, without so much as a stutter in frame-rate.

It’s mayhem. And not the kind of conservative, Saturday morning children’s TV mayhem of so many Smash Bros. titles. It’s bona fide wild-men-picking-fights-with-rocks mayhem, the sort that, in the blur of colour and shape, makes it difficult to know where your character ends and an enemy begins. But it’s also the kind of mayhem that, in some deep place in your being, unlocks the abandoned joy we all play video games in the hope of rediscovering.

Guardian Heroes is the eldest of Treasure’s three seminal releases for Sega’s Saturn (the others being Silhouette Mirage and Radiant Silvergun, which was also recently re-released on Xbox Live Arcade). It mixes the side-scrolling fantasy beat-’em-up play style of Golden Axe with the combat complexity of Street Fighter II and threads them into an OutRun-style branching structure. As a result, the Story Mode is at once familiar and, in the unique combination of these iconic designs, fresh and enthralling.

You have the choice of five characters to play as (four initially – female knight Serena Corsair is unlockable). Alpha male Samuel Han’s brutish sword attacks can swipe through enemies even as they cower behind shields, while the lithe, agile Ginjirou Ibushi complements his super-fast attacks with lightning augmentations. For players who prefer the magical approach, the unlikely-named sorcerer Randy M. Green can employ various types of elemental magic, while Nicole Neil is the only character who can heal herself, an advantage counterbalanced by the fact she has the weakest attacks.

The game is unusually story-heavy for a Treasure release, fully embracing an anime knights-and-castles aesthetic and spinning a tale of regal intrigue that spirals up to the gods themselves. It’s told via regular cut-scene interjections between the short, sharp missions.

Read the rest over at Eurogamer here.

It’s Call of Duty in the air. That’s the sell. That’s what the designers were told to shoot for by their spreadsheet-watching producers. That’s what New York Times bestselling military author, Jim DeFelice, was asked to target when lining up the characters and arc of the story. That’s the bull’s-eye marketing quotation the PR men are hoping the critics will pen: a triple-A quip, ripe for sticking on the poster. And, if Namco Bandai’s focus groups were illustrative of a wider consumer desire, that’s what the gamers want.

Ace Combat – the quintessential Japanese air combat series, positioned in that console-perfect sweet spot between After Burner’s spasmodic arcade thrills and Microsoft Flight Simulator’s nerdish reservations – has been unflinchingly repositioned for the Modern Warfare generation. From the gruff American pilots reminiscing about sorties into Iraq before locking reticules onto hostile Russians, to the slow-motion cutaway kill-cams that glory in each stylish takedown, it’s clear that Assault Horizon is the product of a team of Japanese creatives straining to appeal to a Western audience.

Undeniably, it’s where the money lies. But is it a match made in the stratosphere? And what about those of us who loved the Top Gun-meets-anime aesthetic of the previous games? Let’s not forget that the final stage in the previous game, Ace Combat 6, had us piloting a jet fighter down the barrel of a kilometre-long gun. Once upon a time, Ace Combat was Ridge Racer in the air. So what has been gained by all this faux gravitas?

Diversity, for one. Whereas previous entries in the series focused almost entirely upon jet-plane tussles high above the ground, Assault Horizon is happy to flit from MiG to helicopter to stealth bomber and back again in its tour across the Middle East and Russia.

While the game eases you in with dogfighting familiarity, soon enough you’ll be piloting an Apache Longbow helicopter, hovering over terrorist camps like a throbbing cloud, raining death from above in a mission reminiscent of the flying stages in Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2. The next moment, you’re manning the 50-cal turret on a Black Hawk, exploding yachts in in the Suez Canal, and later you find yourself flying metres above the ground in a B-2 Spirit bomber en route to preventing an ICBM launch in Russia. Modern Warfare’s most memorable flying mission is lifted almost in its entirety as you line up a dispassionate thermal imaging reticule on targets from an AC130 Spooky (before rescuing a downed pilot in a climax that surpasses Infinity Ward’s).

These missions are slotted into a story that, despite being set within our own world, manages to be more ridiculous and pompous than the fictional (occasionally science-fictional) war-politics of the previous entries to the series. Nevertheless, it provides the framework for variety, and while each flavour of air combat has its own strengths and weaknesses, the ride is all the more thrilling for it.

Read the rest over at Eurogamer here

No video game released this Christmas runs contrary to prevailing fashion as hard or fast as Dark Souls. It’s not the muted aesthetic, although dark European fantasy, all chinked cobblestones, crumbling clock-towers and knights in tarnished armour is about as different a picture from the saccharine gloss of Angry Birds and its legion of clones as one could paint.

It’s not the uneasy genre, although ponderous action games in which you skulk through narrow sewers and dense forests while cowering behind a shield have nothing in common with the gung-ho first person military shooters that will generate more revenue than any Hollywood film released this year over the coming weeks. Your hope here is simply that you’ll make it far enough to light one of the bonfires that punctuate the unforgiving world with a rare point of safety, a place to trade currency for statistical upgrades, a respawn point a little farther into the mystery.

It’s not the sense of disempowerment, although the feeling as you set out time and again to penetrate a little deeper into the medieval world of Lodran with its cliff tops patrolled by skeletons and dragons and valleys guarded by ice giants and hydra is one of banging a weak fist against overwhelming odds. Games are so often power fantasies that allow us to play superhero in the evening after a day in the office being forced to play underling. Dark Souls is a game that will crush the ego as often as inflate it.

It’s not the story, although the coma-ish, whisper of a narrative unsettles and disorientates as much as it informs. This is not the story of the brave shepherd boy who leaves his village to save the world but rather the story of a beleaguered warrior limping his way through a shadow world of leviathans, wild-eyed witches and devastating setbacks en route to an undeclared prize. The characters you meet are not straight-talking quest-givers so much as confused freaks, just as likely to befriend you as murder what few allies you have. We’re a long way from the Mushroom Kingdom.

It’s not the fragile economy that runs through the game, although the souls that you collect by defeating enemies in this world will be lost in an instant if you’re crushed in battle. You have just one chance to reclaim your lost currency, by returning to the place of your failure to pick up the deposit of souls, which can be used to purchase better weapons and armour or upgrade one of your character’s parameters in the hope that doing so will help you fall less frequently.

It’s not the save system although the single save slot combined with the constant recording of progress every three steps you take means this is a game that asks you to own your choices like no other. Accidentally kill a key non-player character and, no matter how quickly you manage to stab at the power button to turn the console off, the game will have saved the mistake with no chance to go back. Some of the appeal of video games is the chance to rewrite a better history for yourself with each new life. In Dark Souls you must live with your mistakes, just as you live with your triumphs.

It’s not the obfuscated multiplayer, although the way in which your game world can be invaded by another random player who can choose to help or hinder you has nothing in common with the Deathmatch competitive multiplayer modes that play out across Sony and Microsoft’s servers day by day. There is no voice chat in the game (and players who try to get around this by using Xbox Party Chat will be kicked back to the title screen), the only means of communication being the scrawled messages of support and instruction that you can leave on the ground for others to read. “Ambush coming up,” warns one. “Shoot its tail,” instructs another. The sense of asynchronous camaraderie is beguiling, even though, on first glance, it appears outdated, unfashionable.

No. Dark Souls’ grand heresy against prevailing games industry wisdom is the idea that, if you want to be rewarded in this game, you are going to have to do something worthy of reward. 2011 has been the year in which many developers have found riches in creating game experiences that challenge us not to excel but rather to mindlessly persevere. Increase the abilities of your avatar by simply playing the game every day and you will eventually prevail, they say.

Dark Souls, by contrast, is a game in which you must improve yourself before progress can be won. In that sense it is as orthodox as the earliest arcade games and yet, in sticking fast to this fundamental, feels like the freshest game of the year. It’s a game that asks you to look before you leap, to learn enemy attack patterns before launching your own offensives, to observe.

And in its tall challenge, many of the greatest thrills in the medium are to be found. It’s a game to create an oral tradition, players sharing stories about the time they felled the twin gargoyles on the chapel roof, or when they were cursed by a bug-eyed newt in the sewer and had to fight their way out with a broken health gauge. It’s a game that encourages players to share tips in excited whispers around water coolers and on gaming forums, the kind of game that creates an unspoken connection and understanding between two veterans when they meet for the very first time. ‘You made it through Dark Souls? Sit with me, friend.’

It is a game that brazenly proves game design fashions are just that; transient, fleeting trends that, in attempting to lay down a set of rules only throw down a new challenge for how things might be done. No video game released this Christmas runs contrary to prevailing fashion as hard or fast as Dark Souls. And no video game is quite so exciting or exhilarating.

This review was first published on The Telegraph website.